All Our Pretty Songs Part 1

ALL OUR PRETTY SONGS.

by Sarah McCarry.

What, then, could she complain of, except that she had been loved?.

-OVID.

At least I have the flowers of myself, and my thoughts, no G.o.d can take that.

-H.D.

ALL OUR PRETTY SONGS.

JULY.

Aurora and I live in a world without fathers. Hers is dead and mine was gone before I was born. Her house in the hills is full of his absence: his guitars in every room, his picture on all the walls, his flannel s.h.i.+rts and worn-through jeans still hanging in the closets, his platinum records on the mantel of the marble fireplace that is so big we both used to crawl inside it when we were little. He is everywhere, and so we never think about him. Aurora's mother is a junkie and mine is a witch. When I say it like that, it sounds funny, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

This is a story about love, but not the kind of love you think. You'll see.

Aurora and I grew up like sisters, and this is how we match: same bony, long-toed feet; same sharp elbows; same single crooked tooth (Aurora's left canine, my right front). Same way of looking at you out of the corners of our eyes until you blush. Same taste in music: faster, harder, more. Same appet.i.te. Same heart.

Aurora and I live like sisters, but we are not alike. I am tidy, and Aurora has never cleaned a mess she made in her life. Aurora sleeps until four if you let her, loves Aliens, smiles often, is the kind of girl who will break into your car to leave you a present you don't know you want until you find it. Aurora's mom is richer than anything you can imagine, and mine is poor. Aurora is sunlight, and I'm a walking scowl. Aurora's skin is dark, and mine is watery cream. She bleaches her black hair white and smokes unfiltered Lucky Strikes and drinks too much. She wears dresses made out of white lace and gloves with the fingers cut off, Converse with holes at the toes and old-lady satin pumps, and if you think right now of the most beautiful girl you know, Aurora next to that girl is a galaxy dwarfing an ordinary sun.

I am not beautiful at all, but I am mean. Every day I wear black jeans and the worn-out Misfits s.h.i.+rt that used to be Aurora's dad's and combat boots with steel in the toes. People keep away from my fists in the pit at shows. I cut my dark hair short and my eyes are grey like smoke when I am happy and like concrete when I am not. Every morning I get up at six and run seven miles, into the hills and back, and where Aurora's body is model-skinny, mine is solid muscle sheathed in a soft layer that all the miles in the world can't skim away. Aurora breaks hearts, and I paint pictures. We are both pretty good at what we do.

Before we were born our moms lived like sisters, too. They drove up and down the coast in Maia's diesel Mercedes, following punk bands and sleeping on the beach, dyeing each other's hair pink and blue and orange and green. Maia met Aurora's dad backstage at a show in Los Angeles, before anyone knew how famous he would be. Back then he was just a sad-eyed boy from a s.h.i.+tty town in the Northwest with a guitar and dirty clothes. Maia chased him out into the parking lot and they fell in love as the moon rose over the Pacific. Ca.s.s drove them around while they kissed in the backseat. "It was so much fun we drove to Mexico," Ca.s.s said, the only time she told me the story. The three of them spent a week living on the beach and swimming naked in the ocean every day, sleeping on striped blankets they bought in a market. They had no money, but that was a time when you didn't need money, when it was enough to be young and beautiful and in love. Ca.s.s drove them back to LA and they got married in a twenty-four-hour chapel next to the freeway, with Ca.s.s as their witness and a hungover Elvis impersonator officiating. Neither Ca.s.s nor Maia owned a dress. Maia wore a white slip she'd bought that afternoon in a thrift store and a headdress Ca.s.s made her out of roses and silk ribbons. Ca.s.s wore cutoffs, a dog collar, and the Misfits s.h.i.+rt she stole from Aurora's dad and later gave to me. Before the year was over Aurora's dad would make one of the bestselling alb.u.ms of all time, and then Maia and Ca.s.s would have Aurora and me, and then everything would fall apart. Now Maia sleeps away the years like a friendless fairy-tale princess behind a wall of thorns, and Aurora's dad is dead, and Ca.s.s and I are stuck in the real world of never having enough money for bills despite all of Ca.s.s's spells.

"But that week," Ca.s.s said. "That week was the most perfect week of my life." Maybe it was perfect for Maia, too. I've never thought to ask.

Aurora's room is like an antique store and a record store exploded while mating. Posters hang all over the walls: Arthur Rackham prints, the Pixies, a wet cat hanging from a tree branch with the motto HANG IN THERE. Aurora's embellished the cat with a markered-on mustache and fedora. Piles of magazines, Vogue and Ben is Dead and Spin, Sa.s.sy with all the quizzes dog-eared and filled out in different-colored inks (red for Aurora's answers, blue for mine). Every inch of wall that isn't covered in posters is covered in pictures: Aurora in her dad's arms as a baby, his face already haunted; Aurora and me at every stage of development, from infants with the same fat, formless faces to our first junior-high dance (Aurora in sungla.s.ses to hide how stoned she is, me looking serious and faintly alarmed); Aurora and Maia; Ca.s.s and Maia. The famous picture from Rolling Stone: Aurora as a wide-eyed toddler, clutching her father's guitar, surrounded by the members of his band. It was taken right after he died. The guitar dwarfs her. It's an original print, unframed, tacked carelessly next to a sheaf of dried roses tied together with a dirty ribbon and hanging from a nail. Empty Dr Pepper cans and sticks of incense, rhinestone-covered dresses, Christmas lights and piles of silk scarves, an empty bottle of Chanel No. 5 in a dish full of quarters. Her dad's record collection-crate after crate of old punk and new wave, obscure soul music, seven-inches his band recorded before they were famous. Books on witchcraft, travel guides, old anatomical textbooks, Flowers in the Attic. Her battered copy of Tam Lin that we traded back and forth as kids until the covers fell off. Winterlong and Weetzie Bat.

I used to borrow Aurora's clothes, but as I got older, as it became apparent I'd be the draft ox to her dragonfly, I quit s.h.i.+mmer for death-metal gloom. But sometimes when we're bored we stay up all night eating ice cream and listening to her dad's records. We raid Aurora's makeup drawer for mascara wands and compacts of pressed powder; iridescent eyeshadows; rich, dark-red lipsticks by the handful. I let her paint my eyelids with the intense concentration of an old master, color my lips a Jazz Age maroon. We take Polaroids of ourselves and tape them to her walls, steal Maia's video camera and film ourselves gyrating to the Clash. When we're finally exhausted we fall asleep in her giant bed, curled around each other in a pile of silk and feathers. We don't wake up until long after the morning sun gives way to afternoon.

Tonight, we're catnapping in Aurora's bed, watching Heathers for the fortieth time and eating Cheetos. Ca.s.s would die a thousand agonized deaths if she saw the color of the chemicals going into my mouth. Aurora's in love with Christian Slater, but I think he is too cheesy, even as JD. It's a longstanding bone of contention between us. "Look at him." I lick fluorescent orange powder off my fingertips. "He's, like, engineered in a factory. A factory for teenage girls."

"You comprehend nothing," Aurora says, wounded. "I would totally have gone the distance. Winona Ryder isn't worthy."

"He tries to kill her," I point out.

"Only because she wouldn't follow through with her own vision. You have to commit. That's the lesson. G.o.d, look at those cheekbones." But nothing she says can convince me. There's no real torment behind those eyes. JD is a sham.

"How very." I smirk. Aurora hits me with a pillow.

When the movie is over it's time to go out. Aurora puts on Joy Division and turns it all the way up, knots her bleach-white hair, paints her mouth vampire-purple, puts on dresses and takes them off again, dancing around the room in her underwear. I pretend to be bored. It's our ritual. When she's ready we drive downtown in the old Mercedes that used to be Maia's, windows down, the Jesus and Mary Chain cranked so loud we can't hear ourselves talk. We have fake IDs, but we rarely need them. I've never seen anyone say no to Aurora. We're barely inside the club before someone's buying her one drink, and then another, boys and girls getting in line to cajole her into a smile. Every other drink she hands to me, but I give them back most of the time. Somebody has to keep us safe on the way home. Aurora never thinks about what comes after; she's all now, all the time. This moment, this kiss, this second holds everything. People like Aurora don't have to live with consequences. The stage lights go down and push our way to the front, ready for magic, for wild rumpus, for anything. Ready to go ecstatic.

Tonight, we aren't disappointed. This band is on fire. The singer's tiny, her s.h.a.ggy red-dyed hair sticking up like a ragged halo. She's wearing a long-sleeved thermal, its fraying sleeves hanging to her knuckles, her bony fingers barely visible against the guitar strings. The music is heavy, a sludgy ma.s.s of guitar that makes the room seem even darker. When she opens her mouth to sing the voice that rips out of her is a banshee howl climbing to an operatic shriek. She paces the stage in smaller and smaller circles, pivoting around the axis of the mic stand, energy crackling off her in waves, never once looking at the audience. The drummer is moving so fast her arms are blurs. The ba.s.sist plays the way I love best, cigarette dangling, eyes closed, completely still except for his fingers. Like he's asleep standing up, too cool even to acknowledge how good he is.

Here's me and Aurora in the pit: hot press of bodies, humid smoke-thick air, the two of us up against the stage, elbows planted on the dirty wood. When the music starts with a roar we throw ourselves backward into the crush of people behind us. All the way inside our bodies and all the way outside them at the same time. A wall of noise crashes through us, was.h.i.+ng us clean. Like when we are on the edge of coming and the whole world blows wide open for a second and we can see all the way to the center where everything is still. Guitar so loud we can feel it in our chests. Someone else's hair in our faces and someone else's knuckles in our teeth and sometimes, when it's really good, a current charges from body to body and everyone around us is part of it, part of us, part of the drumbeat thundering through us so hard our breathing s.h.i.+fts to follow its pulse. Music turns us inside out with hunger, the need to hurt ourselves, get drunk, f.u.c.k, punch strangers, the need to take off all our clothes and run around in the gra.s.s screaming, the need get in a car and drive off in the middle of the night with a pack of strangers. We let the music shake us loose from the moorings of our bodies and hearts and brains, until we are nothing but s.e.x and sweat and fists and hot hot light.

Up front we are often the only girls, and we learned early to make a s.p.a.ce for ourselves, to punch if anyone gets too close in the wrong way, kick out like boys, throw ourselves at everyone around us like our bodies are stones. People know who we are now, know Aurora's face and my fists, smile at us, leave room. Sometimes a boy will kneel down, weave both hands into a step for one of us, let us put one booted foot into the cradle of his fingers and then catapult us over the crowd, hands rising to keep us aloft, carrying us to the edge of the stage and then back again. Our bodies are rafts moving across a sea of brothers, fathers, lovers. The air is charged and reckless. Up front is when I feel all the way alive, deep in my animal body, a live wire humming electric. Me and Aurora together, like sisters, like twins. Do you know what it's like to be a girl pieced together out of appet.i.te and impulse? We do. In that place of heat and noise I forget everything, forget being poor and being scared, forget the looming misery of school and the adult world, forget walls and masks and pretense. Up front I forget everything except drum and guitar and heat, the anchor of Aurora's hand in mine as we're tossed across an ocean made out of bodies, breathless and alive and blooming with sound.

When the show is over we are soaked and panting, holding each other tight. Aurora's eyes are huge. "Oh my G.o.d. That was, like, the best." The boy standing next to us is already trying to ask her name, but she ignores him. "Come backstage," she says to me. "I know that girl."

This is the part I hate. I like to keep the magic close, not ruin it with people. "I kind of want to go home."

"Are you kidding? You're no fun."

I sigh. "Okay." She takes my hand and tows me after the band. Backstage, she hops in place while they drag their amps offstage, take apart the drum kit and cart it to their van. I stand, awkward, digging the toe of my boot into the concrete floor. The singer comes over to us and gives Aurora a hug. Up close she's even more beautiful than she was on stage. I'm so shy I don't know where to look. She and Aurora jump straight into gossip. The ba.s.s player, still cool, lurks nearby, pretending not to pay attention.

"You got a light?" It's the drummer.

"Yeah, sure." I follow her outside. Behind the club the alleyway is dark. I light her cigarette for her, and then mine. "You guys were great."

"Thanks." She smokes like she wants to chew on the filter, taps her fingers against her thighs. She's wearing a white men's unders.h.i.+rt. The muscles in her arms ripple as she brings the cigarette to her mouth, patters out a rhythm with her free hand. "You know Aurora?"

"Yeah. She's like my sister."

"Same mom? You don't look alike."

"No, grew up together."

"Yeah?"

"We lived in the same house for a long time. Our moms are old friends." This is not exactly the truth. Our moms were old friends. Our moms haven't spoken since I was a kid.

"You knew her dad?"

"I mean, kind of. I don't remember him. We were really young when he died."

"f.u.c.ked up."

"Yeah." I wait for her to pry. I'm used to deflecting questions about Aurora, about her dad, about her life, about her money. But she drops it.

"Sorry. That's messed up to ask. I can never think of the right thing to say to people."

I laugh. "Me, either. Aurora's the one who's good at that stuff. I stand around."

"You play?"

"Me? No."

"She doesn't either, right?"

"No."

"I guess that's some pretty heavy stuff to carry around. s.h.i.+t," she says, exhaling. "There I go again. Sorry."

"No, it's okay."

We smoke the rest of our cigarettes in silence. Back inside, the ba.s.s player's made his move, slinking up to Aurora as she chirps away. The euphoria of the show has worn off. My ears are ringing and I'm tired. I can tell by the way Aurora is leaning into the ba.s.s player that it's going to be a long night.

The band invites us over. I make Aurora let me drive, follow their beat-up van to an old industrial neighborhood down by the water. Their apartment is the whole third floor of an abandoned factory. It's obviously supposed to be a practice s.p.a.ce, but they have a hot plate plugged into a wall and a curtained-off toilet that I guess pa.s.ses as a bathroom. Every surface is covered with overflowing ashtrays, coffee mugs stuffed with cigarette b.u.t.ts, empty beer cans, half-empty bottles of whisky. There are nests of blankets and clothes in three corners of the enormous room. Somebody, more ambitious than the rest of the band, has gone so far as to hang a moldy shower curtain from the ceiling for privacy. I walk over to the huge windows that overlook the bay and try to ignore the smell. This place must be freezing in the winter, but underneath the filth it's pretty amazing. I can see the streaming lights of cars on the viaduct, and past that the wine-dark water. Far away, the firefly glow of a ferry moves toward the far horizon.

"Pretty great view, huh?" It's the drummer again. Behind me the ba.s.sist is pouring Aurora a drink. I can hear him apologize for the lack of ice, and she giggles.

"Yeah. I want a place like this someday."

"What would you do with all this s.p.a.ce?"

"I paint." I try to say it naturally, but it sounds funny. I'm a painter. Maybe in my dreams. Lah-dee-dah.

"Yeah? That's cool. I can't even draw stick figures. All I'm good at is drumming and was.h.i.+ng dishes."

"People were really into you."

"There's a million bands in this city, and at least ten of them are good. Not enough to go around. I might still be was.h.i.+ng dishes when I'm thirty."

"At least you tried."

"Not many other options." I nod. We're quiet again. She takes out another cigarette, smokes it, taps. I wonder if she twitches in her sleep. She's waiting for me. We are entering the realm of adult transactions. But I don't want to sleep here, and so I don't say anything. I bring my shoulders up to my ears and make the silence hard and without invitation. I hear Aurora's laugh again, and the noise of more people coming into the loft. Someone puts on an old punk record, something loud and fast that I don't recognize. A shot of nervousness runs through me and I chew on my lip, curl my toes in my boots. The drummer leaves me at the window. I don't want to turn around, deal with strangers. I want to grab Aurora and get out of here. I turn enough to see what she's up to. Kissing the ba.s.s player on the couch while people sit on the other end, ignoring them, drinking beer and handing around records. Oh, Aurora. For a young dog, her tricks are pretty old.

I wait until Aurora comes up for air and then I sidle over. "I'm out." The ba.s.sist's a skeeze, but he's pretty tame compared to some of the dudes Aurora ends up with. These people seem nice. They'll take care of her if anything goes wrong. Hold her hair out of her face while she throws up their s.h.i.+tty whisky. I'm far from home, but not too far to walk. She looks up at me.

"Take my car."

"No, it's fine. I'll walk."

"I don't want you to walk."

"I like walking."

"Serious." She rummages through her purse, looking for her keys. I dig them out of my pocket and try to give them to her, but she closes my fingers around them. "Serious," she says again. "I'll get a ride home with-" She stops, turns to the ba.s.s player. "What's your name again?" For a second, he looks hurt, and then his face is cool again. She'll eat him for breakfast, I think, and I can't help grinning. She knows why I'm smiling, and she throws her head back and laughs. "I'll be fine, Mom."

"Okay."

"I love you."

"I love you, too."

To my surprise, Ca.s.s is waiting up for me. She takes a bowl of stir-fry out of the refrigerator. "I can heat it up," she offers. I shake my head, sit at the table, and shove forkfuls of vegetables and tofu into my mouth. Ca.s.s has been a health freak for about as long as I've been sentient. She quit doing drugs when I was a kid. Unfortunately for me, she also quit sugar, television, and fun. She insists the human body is meant to live on raw food, but I told her I'd run away from home if she got rid of the stove, so we compromise. She makes me stir-fry and herbal tea, and I don't tell her when I go to Chinatown with Aurora and eat sixteen different kinds of meat swimming in grease. That way, everybody's happy. Mostly. I would give anything to have a secret stash of, say, pork rinds, but Ca.s.s can sniff out Yellow #5 the way some moms suss pot and dirty thoughts. She was nineteen when she had me, and most of the time she feels like an annoying friend you can't shake and not like a mom at all. But when it comes to restricting my toxin intake, she's a holy terror.

"You out with Aurora?"

"Yeah."

"Good show?"

"Yeah, they were awesome. We hung out with them for a while. She's still there. Not really my scene, though." Ca.s.s snags a red pepper out of my bowl.

"You worried about her?"

"Like, all the time. But not tonight."

"Okay." Her face goes distant and I know she's thinking of Maia. Aurora would be better off in the custody of a potato. At least she could eat it if things got dire. "You let me know, though, if-" She trails off. If what? I want to ask. If Aurora gets loaded every weekend and goes home with boys who are basically strangers? Kind of late in the game for team D.A.R.E.

"It's cool. She's cool. I keep an eye on her."

"That's my girl." Ca.s.s reaches over to ruffle my hair, and I duck. I hate it when she tries to be a parent. It doesn't suit her.

Lately I have been dreaming about a river and a dark forest. In the dream I am standing on a path that winds through trees that are white as bone and without leaves. I am barefoot, and my feet are covered in blood. The only light comes from the trees themselves, an opaline glow like that of a luminescent fungus. The path stops at a river that is too broad for me to see the far bank, and the water moves swift and smooth and has an oily sheen to it. I know there is someone waiting for me on the other side, someone I must find, but I do not know who it is. In the distance I can hear howling. Wolves, I think, or dogs. The bare branches of the trees clatter against each other although there is no wind. I take a step forward, but before my foot breaks the surface of the water I wake up. It is always a long time before I remember where I am.

After Aurora's father died, when I was still very small, Ca.s.s and I lived with Aurora and Maia for a while. The house was always full of people and music then. Maia was a silent shadow, worn wraithlike with grief. She moved further and further away from us, into her own twilit limbo outside s.p.a.ce and time. Sometimes a skeleton-thin man in a long black coat would come to the house and sit in her room with her for hours. Ca.s.s told us he was her doctor, but we didn't know then the kind of medicine he was working with his suitcase full of needles and gla.s.sine bags. Aurora and I weren't allowed in Maia's part of the house, but we stole into it once. I remember candles everywhere, and dark walls without decoration, and a great canopied bed draped with silk and satin and scattered with velvet pillows. Maia slept tangled in the sheets, her arms akimbo, her mouth slack, her nut-brown skin ashen. "Is she dead?" I whispered.

"She's fine," Aurora said. "She sleeps a lot."

Slowly Aurora's father's bandmates and their friends drifted away, escaping their orbit around the black hole Maia had become. There were no more parties, where Aurora and I darted in between the legs of grownups, stole bites off plates and sips out of gla.s.ses and fell asleep, giddy and a little drunk, on Aurora's lawn. No more circles of musicians playing guitars together in the garden until the sky glowed white with dawn. No more lanky-limbed, long-haired men and women twirling us around while we squealed with glee, lifting us to their shoulders and parading us up and down the sweeping marble staircase, or teaching us to slide down the banisters when Ca.s.s wasn't paying attention. The house went still and dead as a tomb.

After that, Ca.s.s took me away from Aurora's palace in the hills. Aurora and I stayed twin-blooded, wearing each other's clothes and finis.h.i.+ng each other's sentences, but Ca.s.s and Maia never talked again. I don't know what happened in that vast house, or if anything happened at all. Maybe Ca.s.s gave up trying to pull Maia out of darkness and settled for bringing me to a brighter world instead. Sometimes I wish Ca.s.s had fought harder, had taken Aurora and Maia with us. I know it was hard for Ca.s.s to get clean, and maybe that's why she left Maia there; she wasn't strong enough for them both. I'm not like that. I will never let go of anything I love.

Aurora and I have lived in this city all our lives. If you came here you would know that it is a young city, out on the edge of the world, just a few hours away from where the earth drops off into the grey ocean that reaches all the way to the far edge of the sky. It is a city of hills and water, ringed in mountains that are capped with white even in the dead of July. The summers are sweet and golden, bookended with long rainy seasons where the sky brushes the earth with a blanket of cloud.

Aurora and I used to spend our days roaming, picking out books at the huge old bookstore downtown with its creaking wooden floors and innumerable rooms, trying on Doc Martens and buying Manic Panic at the punk store under the viaduct, stuffing ourselves with fish and chips on the pier and drinking coffee until our speedy hands shook. We haunted the curio store down on the waterfront, visiting Sylvia and Sylvester, its gla.s.s-cased mummies (Aurora insists they are real; I say no way). Even now we still love putting quarters in the fortune-telling machine and watching the turban-swathed mannequin inside move its jerky mechanical hand and spit out fortunes printed on cardboard squares. Aurora always gets the good ones. On the curiosity-laden shelves a fetal pig bobs in a bath of formaldehyde next to a stuffed two-headed lamb. The store manager once let me take Aurora's picture with the lamb.

We love best the coffee shop up on the hill, a veritable stable of goths and artists. Tall, many-paned windows let in the light, and the red-painted walls are lined with bookshelves. When we were kids Aurora and I would b.u.m cigarettes off cute boys playing guitar at the outdoor tables. She'd pen tortured poetics in her journal while I surrept.i.tiously tried to draw everyone around us. The baristas with their multicolored hair and deliberately ragged clothes, most of them stained with paint or some other indicator of artistic temperament. The strung-out rockers, blinking into their coffee. The street kids. .h.i.tting us up for quarters and trying to get Aurora's phone number.

It was easy to pretend I was an adult in those moments: the rain-dampened streets outside the window, the air hazy with cigarette smoke, the whir of the espresso machine, the low murmur of people talking around us. An adult with a bookstore job, maybe, and a musician boyfriend who would write songs about me. We would stay up all night smoking pot and having s.e.x, and we would only allow our apartment to be illuminated by candlelight. Every room would be hung with glittering beaded curtains. Ca.s.s had no tolerance for my preadolescent pa.s.sions; when I brought home a stack of Jane's Addiction records she scoffed. "Smacked-out posers," she said disdainfully. I couldn't explain to her that there was something in that wash of noise that felt like home to me. Ca.s.s and Maia had lived for punk shows when they were our age, but Ca.s.s never even went out anymore. Never went with us to the dirty all-ages clubs we spent our weekends in, or the bars we started frequenting as soon as Aurora was old and charming enough to get us past the door. Ca.s.s still had all her old records, but I never heard her play them. Finally, one day a few years ago, I dragged them all into my room and kept them there.

When Aurora and I were kids Ca.s.s would take us hiking in the woods outside the city. We'd pick our way across the loamy forest floor, our noses flooded with the green dark smell of moss, of mushrooms coming up out of the damp earth, of fallen trees crumbling into soil and new trees springing up out of the old, their roots snaking through the dead, rain-slick trunks. We'd climb narrow rocky paths up out of the woods, clinging to the sides of mountains, picking our way through alpine meadows awash in monkshood, lupine, and scarlet paintbrush. I loved the immense, vivid silence up there, the way a single marmot cry would echo and echo through the far hills. Up there you felt like you were all alone on the roof of the world, nothing but razor-edged ridges and high peaks as far as you could see in all directions.

These days Aurora isn't interested in wild places, and Ca.s.s rarely has time anymore. As soon as I learned how to drive I started borrowing Ca.s.s's car and going out on my own. I spend the morning panting my way up switchbacks so steep I think sometimes I'll tip over backward. Later, I'll drive home through broken-down logging towns with trailer parks full of moldering doublewides, where men lean against the bar in the one restaurant in town even though it's only three or four in the afternoon. I'll order hamburgers, or milkshakes, fried eggs and sausage, the kinds of foods Ca.s.s never allows across the threshold of our house, and pick at the greasy mess on my plate, wondering how my life would be different if one of those men was my father. Sometimes I see kids my own age. They stare me down, mean-eyed, and I always look away first.

You learn a lot about yourself when you spend most of your time alone. If I'm not with Aurora, I'm never with anyone. Aurora is happiest as the sun at the center of a solar system, and I'm at peace as a quiet moon, no light coming from me but the light that was hers first.

It's hard if you are a girl like Aurora, easier if you are a girl like me. I'm not the one old G.o.ds hanker after, not the one likely to be invited to immortals' parties. The Fates don't bother with small fry like me. I was never jealous of Aurora, not of her beauty or her money or her sad fairy-tale life. I loved her with every corner of my dark and crooked heart. People said our names together in a single breath, like we were two halves of the same body, like they could not imagine either one of us on our own.

I was never jealous, I should say, until him.

I'm smoking a cigarette and trying to draw the ocean when Aurora calls. "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable all the uses of the world are seeming. Right? Are you with me?" I make a noncommittal noise. "Exactly. I'm going to have a party. Come over." I know better than to argue, promise I'll be there in an hour. I grab my bag and unlock my bike from where it's chained to a pipe in the alley behind our apartment building. The night feels dangerous and too warm. It's the kind of dark that makes you reckless, sends an itch creeping under your skin. This summer is the hottest I can remember. The air smells like jasmine and, underneath, the sea. The moon is low and huge in the sky.